Mobil-Eyes Us: Engaging Distant Witnesses in Real Time

Mobil-Eyes Us aims to harness the power of live video and emerging task-routing tools to help frontline activists tap into distributed networks of supporters, turning viewers into active witnesses who can provide guidance, leverage, and solidarity in real time.

Mobil-Eyes Us Pilot: Maximizing the power of live video and activist networks during the Olympics

We ran a small-scale pilot of the Mobil-Eyes Us initiative during the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. You can learn more about what we did and experience some of the livestreams via this update blog we published.

Our pilot in Rio involved collaboration with frontline activists in communities affected by human rights violations to share a series of live-streams and related opportunities for supporters and watching ‘distant witnesses’ to experience directly what is happening, support actions around human rights, and move from being viewers to active witnesses taking action in support of frontline communities.

Our first livestreams with opportunities to act took place in Vila Autódromo (a community evicted in the shadow of the Olympic Media Center) and in Favela Penha facing militarization and evictions to build transport links. We also streamed from the community of Favela da Skol, a community evicted almost six years ago, still not re-housed and now cut-off from housing subsidies as Rio’s city finances collapse. And on the final full-day of the Olympics we streamed from a protest at the heart of the Olympic Boulevard.

We’re now analyzing our experiences during this pilot and planning for the next stages in the project. We’ll be sharing more opportunities to be a ‘distant witness’ and be alerted to live-streams and relevant opportunities to act.

CameraV: Secure and Verifiable Mobile Media

Activists and citizen journalists are capturing and sharing important content every day, but they often have difficulty ensuring that their media is found, trusted, and put to good use. CameraV is an Android app that makes your photos and videos more easily verifiable.

Obscuracam: Privacy in Visual Media

In a world of viral videos and facial recognition, ObscuraCam is an Android app that helps you share photos and videos while protecting the privacy of you and those you care about. ObscuraCam gives users the ability to obscure parts of their media (such as faces or other identifying information) and remove metadata from their media files.

Visual anonymity is also a major part of our broader advocacy work targeted at major tech companies, where we push for where we push for more user control of privacy settings, blurring functionalities and guidance to users that can help them be safer and more effective.